The paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) approach that uses time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding to limit each neuron to at most one spike per time window, enabling energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). A reference-based strategy is introduced to encode the four core LLM components—embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations, and dropout—allowing the construction of a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture trained end-to-end. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 show performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while achieving a 1.5‑billion‑parameter spiking LLM and providing an estimate of spike-related energy consumption.
By Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud
arXiv:2604. 08894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer superior energy efficiency over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
By Zecheng Hao, Shenghao Xie, Kang Chen, Wenxuan Liu, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang
The paper introduces Spiking Contrastive Attention (SCA), a module designed to reduce spectral bias in Spiking Transformers by enhancing high‑frequency information. It demonstrates that spiking neurons and spiking self‑attention act as low‑pass filters, leading to loss of high‑frequency components. Experiments show that SCA improves performance across image classification, semantic segmentation, and event‑based tracking while maintaining lower complexity than the original spiking self‑attention.
By Xiaoli Liu, Malu Zhang, Yang Yang
Spikformer V2 introduces a Spiking Self‑Attention (SSA) mechanism that removes softmax and uses spike‑based Query, Key, and Value to capture sparse visual features efficiently. It also adds a Spiking Convolutional Stem (SCS) and employs self‑supervised learning (masking and reconstruction) to pre‑train the model before fine‑tuning on ImageNet. The result is the first spiking neural network to surpass 80 % accuracy on ImageNet, achieving 81.10 % with a 172 M‑parameter, 16‑layer model in just one time step.
By Zhaokun Zhou, Yijie Lu, Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang, Keyu Tian, Qihao Peng, Yuesheng Zhu, Shuicheng Yan, Yonghong Tian, Li Yuan
arXiv:2606. 20151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs).
By Denis Larionov, Khairutin Shtanchaev, Mikhail Kiselev, Mikhail Korovin, Ivan Tugoy
arXiv:2608. 13702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep neural networks by exploiting sparse event-driven computation, but their training remains challenging because the non-differentiable spike function requires surrogate gradients whose fixed shape may be suboptimal across layers and training stages.
By Kiran Nair, Rodrigue Rizk, KC Santosh
arXiv:2606. 24075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although deep learning-based methods can achieve high accuracy in automatic modulation recognition (AMR) tasks, their high computational cost makes it difficult to strike a balance between accuracy and power consumption, thereby limiting their application on resource-constrained platforms.
By Xiaohu Li, Chongxiao Qu, Caiyong Lin, Chenxiao Dou, Wei Hua
arXiv:2607. 11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of current Spiking Neural Network (SNN) research is to improve their accuracy toward becoming low-power alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
By Jiahong Zhang, Sijun Shen, Man Yao, Han Xu, Mingqiang Huang, Yonghong Tian, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
arXiv:2608.29869v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are often regarded as energy-efficient alternatives to artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet their advantage depends cr...
By Miriam Kranzlm\"uller, Pascal Esser, Gitta Kutyniok
arXiv:2409. 08290v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise higher energy efficiency over conventional Quantized Artificial Neural Networks (QNNs) due to their event-driven, spike-based computation.
By Zhanglu Yan, Zhenyu Bai, Kaiwen Tang, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2606. 13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once.
By Zhanglu Yan, Jiayi Mao, Kaiwen Tang, Fanfan Li, Gang Pan, Tao Luo, Bowen Zhu, Qianhui Liu, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2608. 19238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Transformers model token interactions primarily through spiking self-attention (SSA).
By Dongcheng Zhao, Sicheng Shen, Zhenyu Yang, Zhiyuan Li, Jinyan Yu, Yongjian Wang, Tiechui Yao, Wenli Zhang, Tielin Zhang